Anybody who says ‘IMHO’ is no more humble than Saddam Hussein and Imelda Marcos dancing the tango ‘The standard dead white male language of Jane Austen is now being assailed by piddling abbreviations.’ Photograph: Hulton Getty

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In Australia there is some outfit going by the name of the Productivity Commission that calls books “cultural externalities”. Speaking as someone who, when well, writes cultural externalities for a living, I think it might be more efficient, from the productivity angle, if we could go on calling them books. But I admit that this is merely my opinion, not settled science. If I were advancing this opinion in the form of a tweet or comment, I could insert the acronym IMO, so proving that the standard dead white male language of Jane Austen is now being assailed not only by expansive phrases from institutions that wish to sound more important, but also by piddling abbreviations from individuals who wish to sound pressed for time.

Admittedly, some of those individuals wish to sound humble, too, and might even be so; but saying IMO is a counterproductive way of conveying that impression, because we already assume that your opinion is only your opinion......

His repellent selfies reminded me of when I tried to convince my bathroom mirror that I was Elvis Presley A memorial close to the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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The sun is up, and still I struggle with the column that I usually complete before midnight. Feeling I should say at least something aboutthe disaster in Orlando, I can’t get started. “A writer,” Thomas Mann once said, “is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people.” Yes, but surely it’s not meant to be this hard.

My first thought on the subject is so tricky to write down that the words refuse to connect, but here goes. It might be a waste of time hoping to make the next Omar Mateen tolerant of gay people, or less confused about possibly being gay himself, when he has not yet grasped the much more elementary principle that a fit of pique is not a sufficient excuse for mowing down a hundred strangers.

The west, I fear, will never find out how Mateen didn’t learn this until it starts asking itself how Clive James did learn it. In many respects, when I was young, I was fully as dumb as Mateen. Several of his acutely repellent selfies remind me of when I tried to convince my bathroom mirror that I was Elvis Presley. At the local Presbyterian church, I was in distant love with at least two of the girls in the choir and, like most Australian males at the time, I grew up as a chauvinist. Eventually, after moving to Britain, I caught up with.....

When I was six, I was the only man in the house – so how could I defend my mother if the bad men showed up? Little did I know I had a long life ahead in which I would hear about the bad men almost every day

After the death of Jo Cox at the hands of Thomas Mair, I found myself comparing two photographs and wondering if I hadn’t lived too long. One was of Jo Cox: radiant, intelligent, with no limit to the good she might have done. The other was of Thomas Mair. Here was a face with nothing in it except an unspoken question: do you really want to go on living in a world where a twerp like me can take the life of a woman like her?

After a few hours’ thought, I decided not to quit. But it was no easy decision. Early in my life, I discovered that the mere thought of a woman being at the mercy of male violence put me in a panic. Possibly this had something to do with the fact that I was the only male in the house and just six years old, so how could I defend my mother if the bad men showed up? After I got a Ned Kelly cap pistol for Christmas I felt a bit better, but not a lot.

Little did I know that I had a long life stretching ahead in which I would hear about the bad men almost every day, and always with the same despair. The arts were my refuge. Big mistake. Just recently, writingan article about the great European works of art, I put in a sentence about Bernini’s sculpture of his lovely young mistress Costanza Bonarelli, and I’m still wondering ....

Of the world’s two top gruesome events ever to have taken place in a sea of mud, the Battle of Passchendaele is outranked bythe Glastonbury festival only because the latter has happened more than once. But Glastonbury has the compensatory charm of the rite of passage. Young people learn things there. Queueing for the loos, they get a glimpse of what life is going to be like one day when they run out of energy. Glastonbury is serious.

It’s more what he can do, and not how gorgeous he looks while doing it, that I so envy. Honest’He moves so gracefully and I do not.’ Photograph: Xinhua/Barcroft Images

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Deprived by time and circumstances of almost all my strength, I find that my daydreams of being a Wimbledon singles champion divide into two kinds: real and unreal. My daydream of being Roger Federer is unreal, because he moves so gracefully and I do not, and never have. It goes without saying that I could never play like him, either. Of course I couldn’t: the whole point of a daydream is that it lets you do the enviable thing. For the daydream to be real, however, it has to be plausible that it’s you doing it.

My daydream of being Rod Laver is real, because he, like me, was never an adonis. Pigeon-toed and jug-eared, his image on screen made few women sigh. But that’s exactly what makes my daydream of being Laver so poignantly real. Whenever he hit his famous cross-court running forehand, he could have been me; and the shot seemed all the more uncanny because he himself was an ordinary-looking Aussie bloke. Then, as now, I did all the sighing necessary.

When Federer floats up on to his toes so he can get the racket high enough....

I forget what product this advert sells, and I have seen it about 100 times. Did you hear that, creatives? I have seen your dumb creation over and over, and I still don’t remember what product you’re selling

Harvey Keitel in one of a series of ads based on scenes from Pulp Fiction. Photograph: cityam

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In my granddaughter’s Phoenix comic, there is a story with a recurring feature called The Well Of Infinite Gravy. The invisible well is a time tunnel that does double service as a brain scrambler. You fall into it now and come out again some time ago, with your brains on backwards. Or at any rate I do.

This week, I had a bad Infinite Gravy experience when I not only forgot a hospital appointment – something I take pride in not doing – but I spent several evenings compulsively reliving my years as a TV critic. The infinite gravy twist was that I found myself making notes about commercials that get their plots and characters from old movies or TV shows. Sometimes the actor in the ad was in the original thing, too. John Cleese is inan advert where he attacks his car with the branch of a tree, just as he so brilliantly did in Fawlty Towers. But the ad version is not brilliant: Cleese is supposed to be attacking his own car deliberately, not another car by mistake; and.....

With four enchanting arms, four enchanting legs and two of the most enchanting faces since Gable met Lombard, the merest glimpse of the hybrid creature known as Hiddleswift can be an inspiration if you happen to be immobile, which I more or less am. With my systems of locomotion packing up one after the other, I can just about move if it isn’t hot, but lately it has been hot. Hiddleswift, by contrast, can sometimes walk almost 100 yards before being brought to a halt by the spectacle of a couple of dozen photographers hanging upside down from trees.

This column threatens to be a bit fragmentary this week, because so am I. Not long ago, I missed my usual appointment at Addenbrooke’s to have my immunoglobulin enhanced. The very word sounds as if it is enhanced already, but the important thing the patient has to do is actually get there. A few days ago I did. I got linked into the system, opened my little Oxford Classics collection of George Herbert’s poems and, despite all vows to apply myself, conked out instantly. When I woke up, the TV hanging from the ceiling was saying, but not showing, that John Kerry, arriving at No 10 Downing Street, mistimed his relationship with the front door and got hit in the head.

He is far and away the most learned man I ever met, but can make immediate contact with anyone except the dull

‘Humphries is a swooping, soaring and demonically chortling reminder that a career can last for ever.’ Photograph: Ken McKay/ITV/REX/Shutterstock

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The career of a genius is all high points, like an angry porcupine. Since I can no longer get any further from my Cambridge house than Addenbrooke’s hospital, I won’t be getting to London to see Barry Humphries starring in his show about the Weimar era. But I can tell already that he’s in command of every detail. Without doubt he has chosen his venue, the Cadogan theatre, with Oscar Wilde in mind. Wilde had a lot of physical energy and no limit to his social range: he could bring the house down giving a lecture in an American mining camp. Humphries is like that. Far and away he is the most learned man I ever met, but he can make immediate contact with anyone except the dull. I’d love to see the show but I would be too often reminded that the man up there zooming around the stage is 10 years older than I am. So I think I’ll just lie here quietly.

Though Humphries is a swooping, soaring and demonically chortling reminder that a career can last for ever, it’s usually wiser for an ordinary artist to remember that there are limits, and to pick someone out of the near future to carry your flag. ...

He goes nowhere except in his rattling wheel, while the whole family are chugging along somewhere in their Range Rover

‘Charlie is making another bid for my attention.’ Photograph: Rex Features

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Ruthlessly my granddaughter has parked Charlie, her sole surviving gerbil, in my kitchen for a week while she is in France with her parents. Except for Charlie, who goes nowhere except in his rattling wheel, the whole bunch of them, as I write this, are chugging along somewhere in their Range Rover.

As the sole climate sceptic in my entire family structure I have been known to harbour satirical thoughts about global warmists who ride in large FWD vehicles, but as a doting grandfather I make an exception in this case because my granddaughter, though unusually fleet of foot, has a top speed of far less than 154mph. She would thus be ill-equipped to step out of the way if she were walking at the edge of an open road and encountered the young man who was recently clocked at that speed in Suffolk. And if, by good luck, she was in a car when he hit her, I would prefer it to be as big and strong as a Range Rover at least. A Chieftain tank would be even better.

After the young man’s appearance in court, even the spokesman for a road safety charity seemed to have as much trouble as the judge at getting the point....

I don’t get around much any more, but thanks to the invention of television I have been able to spend another couple of weeks in Rio. Thirty years ago I was filming there and I realised from the first moment that the place had been built to make every human male fantasy either come true or go haywire. On his first day in town, our brilliant young director explained to us all that the secret of dealing with muggers on the beach was to look them in the eye. On his way to the beach he was mugged in the lobby of our hotel.

The hotel was the Copacabana, where Orson Welles had once shacked up with Rita Hayworth. He too, had been a brilliant young director, but after a few hours in Rio he never quite got his life back together again. Life outstrips the mind: especially when the life is female and takes its clothes off. Rio reminds you of that.

My long-term conclusion has been that top-level sport was worth doing as long as it wasn’t me that had to do it

My favourite brilliantly sane Brit of the Rio Games turned out to be Andy Murray.’ Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

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By the time you read this, the Rio Olympics will be over, but I linger on the subject because they will probably be the last Olympics I ever see, and I think they might have had a better press. Back in Australia, the press was bitching because too many of the Aussie female swimmers faded. Let the journalists suggest a better schedule for the runup to the games, then; and perhaps they could suggest that the swimmers might be pestered a bit less before the race.

The Aussie female swimmers are high in my admiration because, when I was young, I had to get used to studying their times and realising that the least of them could go twice as fast as I could. Though reluctant to admit this fact, I was lost in awe, but couldn’t help noticing that the largely male press found it less congenial to admire the dedication of the women. I can remember the startling achievements of Dawn Fraser being belittled in print on the grounds that she was a natural athlete.

Decades went by, and I was asked home to help raise funds for the swimmers....

If James Bumgarner hadn’t changed his name to Garner he might have been slower to succeed

James Garner in The Rockford Files. Photograph: Rex

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Long before he became famous, James Bumgarner changed his name to Garner. If he hadn’t, he might have been slower to succeed. Smart, literate and incurably honest, Garner was a byword in his profession for authenticity, but he permitted himself that one small bogus moment. With the conspicuous and jaw-breaking exception of Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzesinski, Americans of foreign background have always been sensible about changing their names to something easier for the locals to say. Australian immigrants, however, now tend to hang on to their original family moniker, even when it’s an impossible mouthful for anyone without training in phonetics. The politician Tim Soutphommasane is a conspicuous recent example.

For a man whose surname no journalist can spell without medical assistance, Soutphommasane – let’s call him Tim – is often in the news. Lately, he has become famous all over again for complaining that too many people in the Australian political world don’t even try to pronounce his name....

I long ago learned what to do – you give a precis of your book’s best bits

Emilia Clarke in Game of Thrones, one of the box set dramas Clive James writes about in his new book. Photograph: HBO

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If predictions are correct about verse being a dying art, those of us who persist in writing it would probably be wise to forget altogether about getting published, and just send our latest poem to each other as an email. Each of us would have a list of names, not all of them fools. It would be a low-profile solution, however, and not many poets would get as famous as Seamus Heaney, who, in Bellaghy, is about to have a whole memorial building opened in his honour, with a coffee bar. Richly deserved, too. And on a suitable scale: he was a giant.

After a tough week, I have been contemplating my own departure for the beyond. Not that I have been much more unwell than usual, but my professional circumstances have been exhausting. My new little book Play All is about television box sets, not poetry, so there has been no shortage of television people arriving on my doorstep to talk to me about it. Unfortunately, not all of them have read it.

But I long ago learned what to do in those circumstances. You give a precis of your book’s best bits while thanking your dazed interlocutor for finding time to fit this visit into his hurtling schedule of probing the secrets of world leaders. Alas, there are interviewers a notch below the ones who haven’t read your opinions on box sets. There are interviewers who have never seen a box set. ......

Young male actors should still take note of how Rooney observed the pentameter in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Mickey Rooney in 1939. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

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Once again, I have finished reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It gets more marvellous every time. I will read it again if I can. What I certainly won’t be doing is going out to see it, although it is sometimes hard to follow in the text. The two main girls, Hermia and Helena, are often hard to pick apart, a task that gets trickier when, magicked by the forest, they swap their affections for those two rather dreary blokes. Although one of the girls is specified as being as tall as the other is small, in the text that doesn’t show up.

But one of the privileges of being increasingly vague, surely, is to skip the detail and spend more time admiring the essential. Shakespeare makes it clear that the higher spirits who rule the forest, and the aristos who come to call, would add up to a dull bunch if the rude mechanicals were not present, and busy with putting on their clumsy but not hopeless play. As a rude mechanical myself, a cobbler of words for a living, I still admire, this late in the day, the way my trade comes out of the text so well. The lounging aristo spectators might patronise the clumsy dramatic endeavours of Bottom and his gang, but without them, they would have nothing to drawl about. …......

Why did I ever leave? It must have had something with a desire to see the real world – even if it couldn’t be as good as this

Avalon Beach: ‘When I was first a student, Avalon was the weekend gathering place for the Bellevue Hill Mob.’ Photograph: Ian Waldie/Getty Images

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Sydney’s northern beaches. When I was first a student, Avalon was the weekend gathering place for the Bellevue Hill Mob, a bunch of law students I knew at Sydney University. The Mob had more money than I did, but the Australian social system, such as it was, depended on the same sun shining copiously on everybody. I hear it still does, with enough light left over to reach right around the world and roast me here on my balcony, making work impossible, except for my writing increasingly nostalgic poems about Avalon. I have plans to put a couple of them in my new slim volume of poetry, due out early next year.

I must be crazy to be planning a new book, or any new anything. In my condition, the best strategy is to lie down and expire. But while breath lasts, it seems a pity to waste any of life’s remaining blessings, and one of those is, for a little while at least, clear sight. ....

I’m a bit late giving an opinion of the Brangelina bust-up, but I thought that the royal couple might make it together all the way to old age, especially because they went on having and adopting children together at such a rate that it would always take two of them to drive the bus. And they were both very talented, which can look like intelligence in the hot lights.

Now they will go on being talented, but not together. It has always taken confidence on the spectator’s part to findBrad Pitt gifted. He looks like a standard-issue Hollywood pool attendant with his head on upside down. But quite early in his career he proved that he could act. His dumb swagger is the thing you remember from Thelma & Louise, along with the car going over the cliff with two lovely women inside it in a gesture even less credible than the sculpted look of Brad’s lower stomach.

It made me very scared about screwing up, which luckily didn’t happen, so when I emerged from the evening, my shoulders glittered with borrowed stardust. Now years have gone by and it turns out that Graham Chapman wasn’t the only Python who was mortal all along. On screen, they always looked as if they had a combined age of about 30, but it was an illusion born of exuberance.

Before the Pythons, there were Spike Milligan’s Q programmes. Some scholars hold that Spike was the true ancestor of Pythonism. The argument has a lot to it, because apart from Terry Gilliam’s dementedly extravagant artwork, it is quite hard to think of anything the Pythons invented that Spike hadn’t already at least hinted at.......

The final fade-out approaches, and the chances are that nobody now will make a movie of my book Unreliable Memoirs, the story of my growth to manhood

Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner in The King And I, 1956. Photograph: 20th Century Fox/Getty Images

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The new TV drama Westworld is predicted to astonish this generation of viewers even more thanthe movie it is based on astonished the global cinema audience back in 1973, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Actually, I saw the movie at the time and wasn’t astonished much. We were asked to be amazed that Yul Brynner, underneath his cowboy costume, was really a robot. It was like being asked to be amazed that when he played the lead in The King And I, he was powered by a generator. He was that kind of actor: precise, but you could hear the valves fizzing.

It wasn’t Yul’s fault, and if he hadn’t been so successful, I wouldn’t dream of belittling him now. Elbows slightly extended to indicate the bulk of his lateral muscles, he carried himself with dignity right to the end. On location in Britain forThe File Of The Golden Goose, he had to arrive dramatically in Liverpool. They ran out of dough and pretended that London’s Liverpool Street station was Liverpool, a pretence accomplished by covering up one end of a station name-plate with canvas. Yul, instead of downing tools, played the scene in full grimness mode, elbows dramatically flexed. Watching in awe somewhere in the cinematic dark – I was one of three paying spectators – I vowed that I would try to stay as cool as that when the god Chronos came for me.

Sally Phillips: ‘one of the all-star cast of Smack The Pony, a show I watched in awe.’ Photograph: ITV/Rex/Shutterstock

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Nothing makes me feel decrepit and obsolete quite as much as when friends of my children make television programmes. That used to be my business, but now it’s theirs. Simon Finch, a friend of our family since for ever, has just done a documentary called The Good Terrorist, which is one of the best summaries I have seen about what took so long to happen in South Africa. It deals with the trial and execution of the only white man who managed to convince himself that planting a bomb in a Johannesburg station would be a dramatic blow against the oppressive white government. Finch argues the rights and wrongs with great subtlety for someone I first met when he had only recently graduated. At the same age, I myself had rarely demonstrated any subtlety at all.

If Trump loses, we will still not be free of his extravagantly coiffed shadow, because the analysis will begin as to why he lost

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the third and final US presidential debate. Photograph: Paul J Richards/AFP/Getty Images

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Donald Trump has not yet been elected president, so my plans to leave the planet are still on hold. I might have to leave soon anyway, but I would rather not have to book my seat on the rocket just because some baroque narcissist in the Oval Office had declared atomic war on North Korea, or South Dakota, or whatever target took his fancy when the hottest patootie in the West Wing typing pool swerved away from the outstretched plea of his tiny hands.

If Trump loses, we will still not be free of his extravagantly coiffed shadow, because the analysis will begin as to why he lost. Nobody sane will ascribe Hillary’s victory to her own command of language. If either of them commands the language, Trump does, by sticking a short finger in its ribs and walking forwards until it walks backwards.

Subjected to such treatment, Hillary was rightly praised for her poise, but she should have told him at least once to go screw himself. As things turned out, the figure who really had Trump’s number was Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live. Baldwin has the wrong mouth to be Trump – Baldwin’s mouth looks like a mouth – but in all other respects, he was a terrifying simulacrum.....